Property developers with high expectations

How far will developers and designers go to justify multimillion-pound asking
prices?

The luxury property development world knows no bounds when it comes to decoration

By Christopher Middleton

6:25PM BST 15 May 2013

When the apartments at the Shard come on the market later this year, we all know what the main selling point will be: the view. Asking prices for these ultra-high-rise dwellings (floors 53 to 65) are expected to be anything from £30million to £50million, based on the fact that residents are able to look out across a 360-degree cityscape, and gaze as far off into the distance as the North Sea.

Small wonder, then, that the company selling the apartments is talking up not the fixtures and fittings, but the fact that the Shard (1,016ft), near London Bridge, is the tallest building in Western Europe. It doesn’t anticipate much trouble finding buyers, either. ‘There are 10 apartments for sale, so I think about 20 phone calls should do it, don’t you?’ responds the Shard’s spokesman Baron Williams when asked to outline the sales campaign.

Maybe so, but that’s not the kind of lofty attitude other London super-prime developers can afford to take. They are asking high prices and, in the absence of a Shardtastic view, they know they have to provide something extra-special in terms of design. ‘Our buyers are high net-worth individuals who stay in the best hotels all over the world and are constantly exposed to the latest developments in decor and visual presentation,’ says Jonathan Wyatt, associate director of top-end London developer Grosvenor. ‘As a residential developer you have to up your game and keep a constant eye out for new ideas. The last thing a purchaser wants is to be showing off a feature of their home and have a guest say, “I know where that comes from; I’ve seen it before.”’

At this stratospheric end of the market, where prices are in the multimillions, homeowners want to extract even more oohs and aahs from their visitors than those at the lower end of the market. So besides providing the standard super-prime features (exclusive address, impressive hallway, soaring ceilings), the developer has to go considerably further, peppering the property with design touches that will bowl over the buyer as well as tickle their fancy and capture their imagination.

These touches come in many different manifestations. Sometimes they take the form of spectacular individual pieces, as demonstrated at 55 Park Lane (properties available through Harrods Estates and Knight Frank), where the 2,500 crystals on the Swarovski mirror took four people four days to attach by hand.

Sometimes, says Carol Bennett, of Designed Interiors, an individually commissioned item can spill over into the realms of the positively wacky. ‘There’s a New Zealander called Neville Stephens who makes the most extraordinary, personalised gas fires, theming them around his client,’ she says. ‘One of his creations was made to look as if it had £50 notes inside, with flames licking around them.’

Meanwhile, at 8 Cornwall Terrace, overlooking Regents Park (available through Savills and Knight Frank; price on application), the centrepiece of Siri Schumann’s design is a £45,000 solid-bronze table, which took Deptford firm Based Upon nine months to build.

Not that these extra touches have to be all manicured and smooth. At the Cotswold home that he helped design for model Elle Macpherson, as part of the development by international firm Yoo, Mark Davison (ex-Manhattan Loft Corporation) has gone for a rugged, natural look. ‘The interior walls are covered with timber panels recycled from dismantled Amish barns in North America,’ he says. ‘The tiles we used [Tiles of Stow] are subtle, grading from one shade to another. Even the metal cooker hood [made for the scheme by Almondsbury Forge] has an uneven, handmade feel.’

While such detail counts as going that extra metaphorical mile on the client’s behalf, in reality it often requires many hundreds of miles of travel and many hours of unglamorous work. For example, the task of choosing marble for the apartments at London’s 3-10 Grosvenor Crescent (15apartments, with a total value of £200million) required no less than six visits to Henraux, a 190-year-old Italian stone supplier at Querceta, near Lucca. ‘On one particularly hot day, I looked at 89 different slabs of marble,’ says Grosvenor’s Jonathan Wyatt. ‘At this level, you have to be a perfectionist.’

Cutting-edge technology plays its part, too, as at Candy & Candy’s development One Hyde Park, where the ceilings are chilled with water to ensure a good night’s sleep in hot weather. ‘In many ways, developments like One Hyde Park have rewritten the definition of luxury in central London,’ says Alex Carr, who works for the Primus section of estate agent Knight Frank (properties worth more than £3,000 per sq ft). ‘Just as it used to be only Jaguars or BMWs that had CD players, which then spread to all makes of car, so every luxury apartment owner now wants entry to the building and their front door to be accessed via their mobile phone. As a consequence, developers have to keep pushing the envelope to come up with new innovations and higher levels of luxury.

‘We’re starting to see a growing trend towards all cinema rooms being fitted with 3D technology, and bathrooms doubling as hair salons, with special basins in which clients can have their hair washed by visiting stylists.’

Other increasingly urgent must-haves are steam ovens, gender-specific wardrobes, wallpapers not yet on public release, houses with two kitchens (one for show, one for staff to do the real work), and floor-length mirrors that record your image and play it back a few seconds later, so you can see your new outfit from all angles. There are even design firms that engage the services of galleries, the likes of the Halcyon Gallery in Mayfair, to select and hang paintings that may encourage a prospective purchaser to buy the property in question (and perhaps the paintings, too). It’s all a far cry from traditional selling tactics such as fresh flowers and the aroma of newly baked bread.

‘One thing you should never forget,’ says Carr, ‘is that when people have got £60million to spend they have pretty high expectations of a property. Sometimes it’s the finishing touches that can make them remember yours.’

Joe Burns, Managing director, Oliver Burns

Thoughtful luxury’ is the theme that runs through Oliver Burns developments, and when it came to the wallcoverings at the Walpole, the opulent five-apartment development in Mayfair (£11.5million per apartment), there was lots to be thoughtful about.

‘We used hand-sewn silk wallpaper from Fromental [right] at £4,000 per roll, and it cost £25,000 to cover one wall,’ says Burns. ‘Three lots of lining are required before the wallpaper hanging can be done. It’s more like installing a mural.’

Elsewhere within the apartments, walls are covered in seashells from the Philippines. Farmed and found in abundance in the coastal waters of the Filipino province of Capiz, these ‘capiz’ shells are flat, semi-transparent and formerly the homes of marine-dwelling molluscs that go under the scientific name of Placuna placenta. ‘We like the fact that they are a natural, sustainable resource,’ says Burns, who used Illinois-based firm Maya Romanoff to supply the shells in wall-tile format (top right).

While he didn’t have to travel to the Philippines to hand-pick the shells, he did have to travel to Italy, to select the marble for the Walpole bathrooms (top). ‘Someone can show you a small sample of marble in London, but when the consignment arrives the colour and pattern can be very different,’ he explains. ‘So you visit the quarries to ensure you order a sizeable slab that will have the consistency of tone you’re after.’

On days when he wasn’t trudging around mines in Italy, Burns was roaming through warehouses in London, searching for fine wooden surfaces at the headquarters of Exotic Veneer, in Waltham Forest. ‘You sift through piles of wood veneers, armed with a wet rag to wipe off the dust, looking for the right combination of natural beauty and grain continuity. Once you’ve found your material, it can still take three to four weeks to perfect the colour and staining of the veneers.

‘On top of this, we gold-leafed quite a lot of the joinery, which involved gilders applying the leaf with fine artists’ brushes. ‘Was it worth it? Well, the penthouse at the Walpole sold for £4,542 per sq ft (the actual sale price was £20million), and the previous record was £3,800 per sq ft.

The finishing touches may seem small, but at the top end of the market they do add value.’

One of the more surprising materials chosen by Jiin Kim-Inoue for Finchatton’s Lansbury development in Knightsbridge (apartments from £3.65million to £12.5million), is stingray skin (below right). She used it to cover the desk in one of the master bedrooms (right), choosing it for its opalescent looks and remarkable durability. ‘Stingray has a very robust skin, thanks to the strength of collagen fibres, making it ideal for leather goods,’ she says. ‘Visually, the scales create a pattern resembling hundreds of dark, glittering pearls; the intricate beadwork is as irresistible to the touch as to the eye.’

Only two species have skin covered with these pearly scales — Himantura imbricate and Himantura walga, found in tropical seas around Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand. Marine creatures aren’t the only form of wildlife featuring at the Lansbury. The stair banisters are made from hand-sewn calf leather, and in the top-of-the-range triplex apartment is a buffalo- horn and dark-timber coffee table. ‘We work with craftsmen who refine the raw horn with materials such as chrome, wood or leather,’ says Kim-Inoue.

Creating the effect of naturally occurring materials is also an impressive art. Stopping short of an actual waterfall, one of the six Lansbury apartments features a pendant crystal ‘rainshower’ designed by Wiltshire-based Bruce Munro. Stretching from the top of the ground floor to the lower-ground floor, this glittering creation serves as a light source, a discreet screen and an artwork in its own right.

The main philosophy driving the Lansbury design is that everything should be a tailor-made one-off. Thus, hand-embroidered bed linen has been commissioned from fabric designer Gayle Warwick, wallpapers supplied from the small-but-exquisite Hermès range, and art consultant Christopher Penn has assembled pieces that suit the apartments and help justify the asking price.

The high level of ‘bespokeness’ extends even to the desk drawers. They’re lined with soft, cream-coloured leather, thereby minimising noise when opened and maximising visibility of the items inside.

He started his firm as a bespoke furniture business, but David Linley has evolved into top-end interior design, with clients including Oprah Winfrey and Jo Malone. Having created show apartments for the Lancasters development, overlooking Hyde Park, Linley is now working on the project to convert Battersea Power Station into flats and penthouses (prices up to £6 million and beyond; see p53).

As part of that scheme, he is creating a replica of the power station’s monumentally sized bronze doors, but he admits he’s just as happy with smaller-scale work.

One of his tricks, when designing interiors, is to create furniture with secret drawers (right), for the hiding-away of everything from cash to jewels and cigars. Besides being able to conceal their valuables, owners can challenge guests to find the drawers and operate the mechanisms that open them.

The Linley approach is to design interiors that offer both visual appeal and a talking point. Take his marquetry-panel map of the world (above left), consisting of 29 different wood veneers, each one representing the country from which it originates: burr oak for England, cedar for Spain, eucalyptus for Australia and maple for Canada. Or his artfully designed coffee table, which turns into a chess board when you detach the centrepiece (hand-carved knights, kings and pawns are stored inside a slide-out drawer).

‘When designing an apartment, we apply the same principles of tailoring and engineering as we would for individual items of furniture,’ says Linley. ‘We don’t just pay attention to detail, we have a bit of fun, too.’

Hence the large picture window in one of the Lancasters’ master bedrooms, which one minute looks out towards Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, and the next (at the touch of a button) becomes misty and opaque.

‘On that same project, we covered the hallway and corridor walls in mother-of-pearl for added lustre and a sense of occasion. I’ve always been of the opinion that you need a bit of entertainment as you walk from one room to another.’